One Man Left Studios is over a year old, but it’s been about 4-5 months since I’ve gone ‘full time’ indie. It’s been an awesome experience thus far and each new day brings a lot of joy and excitement. It’s really hard to describe the feeling of going from a job you simply ‘show up for’ and one that you can’t wait to start working on. But looking back to how I felt about certain aspects of the working life to what I feel now, a lot has changed:...

Ok, that title is kind of misleading. But for those who caught the reference, *high five*. I actually pulled gyroscope support from our latest Tilt to Live update. I had it implemented into the game at one point but through beta testing eventually killed the feature. I just wanted to go over the details as to why it went the way of the dodo bird. Gyroscope != Accelerometer Alright this a biggie....

Lot’s going on in OML-Land. TTL HD is out the door. TTL HD 1.1 is already in Apple’s queue (fixing a horrible crash for our international users). TTL 1.5 (iPhone) is in testing right now. On top of some R&D type stuff I’m messing around with so we can transition to our next project more smoothly. So retina graphics are all the rage at the moment. If you were lucky to develop your game assets all in a vector-based format, supporting retina graphics was a bit easier....

Despite the good advice on just using a library or someone else’s solution to getting game center working, sometimes I’m just stubborn. Well it wasn’t actually completely stubbornness as it was more of a “don’t have an alternative” situation. Tilt to Live uses AGON for it’s leaderboards and awards system. It has served us well and never faltered. Despite that, Game Center has arrived to rain on it’s parade so-to-speak. To give TTL hopefully more life in the long run I decided to implement Game Center alongside AGON over the past week....

Let me first start off by saying how great it feels to be genuinely “busy”. I’m talking about the “excited-and-can’t-wait-to-get-started-or-get-finished” type of busy. I’m slowly finding out that the days are flying by with me barely noticing. Each morning, I’m looking forward to getting to work (yes, even Mondays). So either I’m strange or have found something I truly love doing :). Anyway, I don’t have any technical insights for this week’s post, just more of a status update on something I’ve been tinkering with....

We sent off Tilt to Live HD to Apple for review today. I couldn’t send it off until around 3 PM today because my internet was down (since 6 AM) due to a less then stellar ISP here in Alabama. *sigh*. But that won’t get me down, I’m super excited that TTL HD will be on the ipad app store in a few short weeks! Right now I’m busy trying to cut and edit footage together for a launch trailer....

A friend of mine sent me this list of anti-patterns common in software engineering. Being the lone developer on my team, I don’t get to see anyone else’s code except mine on a project. As a result, it’s hard to critique whether my code is “good” or not. That was one of the benefits of working at a company I suppose. Being surrounded by those with more experience than me, I would learn a lot just from an afternoon of working on a section of code that wasn’t mine....

After reading Noel’s post on prototyping I realized I was drifting away from that mind set and getting into dangerous territory of just “thinking up a game and running with it.” Tilt to Live itself spawned into a full game from being discovered in a rough prototype. Since then we’ve just had rough documents and ideas that we wished to pursue after TTL. The past few weeks we’ve been gearing up more heavily for our next game and I’ve been getting back into the habit of whipping out fast prototypes....

I recently made a post on our official OML blog about what Adam and I are playing. Taking a look at that list you’ll find that the vast majority of games I play are multiplayer oriented. A lot of biases, inspirations, and design decisions that go into my game designs are influenced by multiplayer games. When we set out to start One Man Left, my long term goal for the company (beyond making fun games we like to play) was to be known for making fun multiplayer indie games for whatever platform we develop for....

So I’m currently playing around with some multiplayer prototypes on the iphone, and when it came down to testing stuff I ran into a problem: You can’t deploy to multiple devices at the same time. Yea it’s not exactly a ‘problem’ per say, but it’s certainly tedious doing a ‘build and run’ on the devices you want to test. So much so that I dropped 3 player support in a prototype just to save time....